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Ignoring the Planet Won’t Fix It

It’s hardly surprising that a study released the other day by a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research didn’t register on any political radar screens, amid Kentucky foot stomps, dead wrestlers, $2 billion in campaign spending and the pitched battles for control of Congress.

And, political year or not, there’s only so much news value in any projection of what might happen in climate science. Still, you don’t need a Ph.D. to ponder the potential ramifications of the study, by Aiguo Dai, who works with the center’s Climate and Global Dynamics Division.

It concluded that, over the next 30 years, warming temperatures associated with climate change were likely to create increasingly dry conditions in the United States and droughts around the globe on levels seldom seen before. Previous studies by Dr. Dai have indicated that climate change may already be producing drier conditions. A 2004 study found that the percentage of the world’s land area facing serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

The recent study concluded that most of the western two-thirds of the United States will be significantly drier by the 2030s, and that large parts of the nation may face an increasing risk of extreme drought. This is not about melting ice caps; it’s about Dust Bowl-style drought within two decades.

“If the projections in this study come even close to being realized, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous,” Dr. Dai said.

As my fellow columnist Clyde Haberman noted the other day, two words were absent in the New York Senate debate on Sunday: Iraq and Afghanistan. Actually, despite all the noise in politics this year, there are many others. Heard much about the urban poor? And here are two others that have fallen off the table: climate change.

When Barack Obama won the nomination, he said his election to the presidency would be historic on two issues: health care and climate change, a point when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Two years later, you can barely find the phrase “climate change” on the Web sites of Democrats running for office, and for Republicans it has become an item of faith to be a skeptic on the science and a critic of cap-and-trade legislation meant to limit carbon emissions.

Despite debate, informed and less so, the scientific consensus has not changed. In May, the National Academies of Science reported to Congress that “the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change,” because global warming is “caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems.”

But the politics have changed, recast as a Republican wedge issue based around opposition to cap-and-trade.

It’s not hard to understand why. It’s the economy, stupid, as never before. It’s a Republican year, and this isn’t a Republican issue. Climate change has never been a front-burner issue, and it’s the ultimate nightmare to communicate: you don’t see carbon in the air the way you see smokestack emissions. It’s global, not local. The effects evolve over the long, long run. We can tune in 50 years from now and find out who was right, at which point it will be too late.

Anything portrayed as a tax is a loser this year, hence the fate of cap-and-trade, originally envisioned in the Reagan years as a business-friendly, market-based environmental approach.

And you can make the case that in some ways climate awareness has gone mainstream. No one talks about climate change, but even Republicans voice support for clean energy and green jobs. So maybe there’s progress toward what’s being called a postpartisan climate approach that focuses on stimulating nonpolluting energy technology through incentives, innovation, direct investment and procurement policies.

“Given the economy, it’s no surprise that people aren’t rolling out of bed focused on rising seas and polar bears,” said Cathy Duvall, national political director of the Sierra Club. “But they are thinking about what it takes to create jobs for the future and how to make America a leader in the global economy and clean energy.”

Or maybe that’s how we flatter ourselves as we focus on immediate disasters. There is plenty of concern about the economic future we’re leaving for our children. As for urgency about the planet we’re leaving them, that can slide until a more convenient time.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on October 28, 2010, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Ignoring The Planet Won’t Fix It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe